Description:

Hong Kong and China Conversation in Actions

During my years of practice in the Hong Kong film industry, I experienced many film projects, such as Fearless (2006), which I was involved in 2006, that were scripted by Hong Kong and mainland China screenwriters and directed by Hong Kong director Ronny Yu, who had developed his practice in the United States. The main cast are a combination of Hong Kongese, mainland Chinese, and Taiwanese actors. The film’s action design is centered on Beijing opera—a cultural memory of Hong Kong cinema that has gone global—and shows the intricacies of the film’s identity while being inextricably linked to China. In the past, I would have thought that this was a reintegration and re-positioning of Chinese performance culture, and I would have simply thought that this was a natural occurrence and a manifestation of an inherent identity.

However, through the investigation of practice-based research, I have developed and renewed my ideas through the philosophical concept of Deleuze as a research framework. Nowadays, Hong Kong cinema, especially action cinema, is slowly integrating with mainland productions, but what we are experiencing is not a reintegration but a continuation of the deterritorialization and reterritorialization process. This process is guiding both Hong Kong and mainland Chinese cinema toward a state of flow. They flow to decoding themselves. It is the becoming of China’s cinema, a becoming of Hong Kong action movies, and a Becoming of action-narrative approach. In my practice, I am also experiencing the transcendence of a film genre.

Client:

Edko Film (Hong Kong)

China Film Group (China)

Project Duration:

6 Months

Project Type:

Commercial Film

Role:

Visual Effects Supervisor